‘Stabbed In The Back': Unions, House Democrats Call Whitmer's Veto Of 9 Bills A Betrayal

Michigan Advance

July 16, 2026

There were 15 new voicemails and 25 unread text messages on Michigan AFL-CIO President Ron Bieber’s cell phone when he reemerged from an hours-long kayaking trip on the afternoon of Friday, June 10. Bieber’s first impression was that someone must have died.

The dearly departed, however, wasn’t a family member or a key figure in the labor movement, but rather a package of nine bills that had been the subject of an 18-month court battle between the House and Senate in a precedent-setting case to determine when and how bills passed by both chambers should be transmitted to the governor’s office for a signature.

After nearly two years in court fighting for those bills to reach Whitmer’s desk, the governor unceremoniously vetoed all of them on Friday afternoon, killing off a set of key Democratic priorities from the 2023-24 session and, in part, a key priority for Michigan’s unions.

“I’m an old dude now; an old dog in the labor movement,” Bieber told Michigan Advance on Tuesday. “I thought I’d have seen everything. I’ve never seen anything like this … the feeling of betrayal and being stabbed in the back, in that short of a period. I have never witnessed that.”

That was the prevailing feeling for those who championed the nine bills, including House lawmakers who spoke to The Advance for this story.

The legislation included a shield for working families against debt collection practices that seize tax returns made possible by the Earned Income Tax Credit (House Bills 4900 and 4901); a measure to strengthen pension benefits and retirement security for public safety professionals, adding corrections officers to that category (House Bills 4665, 4666, and 4667); and a measure preventing massive healthcare costs for teachers and school employees, first responders, nurses and other public servants (HB 6058). The latter bill would have also returned healthcare decisions to negotiations between employees and employers.

Whitmer’s justification for the vetoes was that packages contained outdated, year-old effective dates, making their implementation incredibly difficult and with steep administrative burdens.

Rep. Kara Hope (D-Holt) speaks on the House floor on June 21, 2023. (Photo: Anna Liz Nichols)

State Rep. Kara Hope (D-Holt) was the sponsor of HB 4900. She is not seeking reelection this year due to health issues. Hope called the entire ordeal “unfortunate.”

“I spent the better part of two years on this, and it seemed like a winner,” Hope told the Advance. “It seemed like the right people were on board, so it’s disappointing because, also for me, there’s no time really to get it going again. I could introduce it again this term, but I’m going to have to hand it off to somebody else. It’s not going anywhere this term.”

Last week, Michigan’s Supreme Court ended the battle over the bills by taking no action in the matter, allowing a previous Court of Appeals ruling to stand. The appellate court had ruled that both the House and Senate have a constitutional duty to send legislation that originated in their chambers and was duly passed by both to the governor’s office for a signature. That includes passed bills that had been withheld for some reason in a previous session.

Such was the case for the nine bills in question.

In the days just after the 2024 legislative session ended, the clerk of the House and then-House Speaker Joe Tate (D-Detroit) did not transmit those specific nine bills to Whitmer’s office despite other bills being sent to the governor at the end of the lame duck session. The bills were still sitting there, so to speak, when current House Speaker Matt Hall (R-Richland Township) took over.

No clear explanation has ever been offered by the House or the administration as to why the bills weren’t sent when Tate still had control of the gavel, other than it just didn’t happen. Whitmer never publicly signaled or demanded that the bills be sent to her desk, either.

Hall refused to transmit the bills and questioned whether it was constitutionally or procedurally sound to send old bills from a previous session to the governor, which in turn would be signed in a new legislative session. The lawsuit at the heart of drama followed when Senate Majority Leader Winnie Brinks (D-Grand Rapids) called on Hall to transmit the bills. He did not, and Brinks sued.

Over the course of that legal battle, there had been speculation that Whitmer secretly opposed the bills and had no intention of signing them in the first place. Whitmer’s communications team told the Advance, when asked on the record, that any conjecture or assertion that Whitmer had contacted Tate, the clerk of the House or Hall, with instructions to hold the bills was false.

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Reps. Phil Skaggs, Julie Brixie and Will Snyder before presenting her budget proposal to the Michigan House and Senate Appropriations Committees on Feb. 8, 2023. (Andrew Roth/Michigan Advance)

Long legal battle left bills with outdated implementation dates

The state’s Freedom of Information Act does not cover the Legislature nor the governor’s office. If it did, it might have been possible for the Advance to fact check Whitmer’s assertion by requesting all communications between her office, Tate, the House clerk and Hall during the 2024 lame duck session and afterward, when Hall came to power.

State Rep. Will Snyder (D-Muskegon), who sponsored a piece of the package to strengthen pensions and retirement benefits for corrections officers, said he had at least one conversation with the governor on his bill about a year ago. Snyder told the Advance that there was no real commitment from her or position given from her office at that time.

The only other conversation Snyder had with Whitmer’s office was on Friday morning, after the high court decision had landed and as Whitmer was gearing up to veto the slate of bills.

“I would say the conversation mirrored the veto letter, and reflective of implementation dates and their concerns there,” Snyder said, adding that he pushed back on Whitmer’s reasoning.

“The governor already has a track record of signing legislation into law that has implementation dates that have already passed,” Snyder said. “She did that with House Bill 4173 of 2023, which created the sentencing commission. It was a bill that had sat in the Senate for 18 months, I believe, without any action; a bill with multiple references to implementation dates that had passed by the time it was signed into law. I think that is upward of seven implementation dates that are referenced in there that already happened.”

Legislatively, it also would not have been a difficult lift for the House to amend the bills and their implementation dates if Whitmer had signed them last week.

Ron Bieber, president of the Michigan AFL-CIO, speaks at a rally outside the Michigan Capitol to urge lawmakers to reach a budget deal before the government shuts down in the coming week. Sept. 24, 2025 | Photo by Ben Solis/Michigan Advance

A sense of betrayal from the party’s figurehead, GOP House leadership

“I believe that any errors that might have occurred with effective and implementation dates could have been corrected by the Legislature, whether that be this session, under divided government, or into the future,” Snyder said. “And I believe that is a very possible outcome that could have been used.

The courts could have also cured the implementation and effective dates issues, Snyder said, much like the courts did when it pushed through the stagnated Earn Sick Time Act, which was also the subject of a years-long court battle at the end of the legislative “adopt and amend” ballot proposal scandal.

State Rep. Mai Xiong (D-Warren) also quarreled with the governor’s explanation over effective and implementation dates.

“They could have been signed, we could have amended them even after they were signed into law. We always do that,” Xiong said. “That’s why the work is never really done. It’s harder now to realistically believe, or to even tell lawmakers to ‘amend these bills and get them back to my desk.’ It’s easier said than done when he himself did not want to give the governor these bills.”

“What makes you think that he’ll even take them up for a vote in a different form?”

Bieber said he remembers the long night he and his staff spent watching lawmakers from the House and Senate galleries in December 2024, when the House stalled out and was unable to pass bills due to chamber dysfunction, and as the Senate worked overtime, as well, to get every House bill it had out of the chamber and to Whitmer’s desk — including the nine bills in question.

“When it passed, we felt such joy, you know? That we had finally closed the loop on some of these things,” Bieber said. “We all heard then, in January, the nine bills didn’t get transmitted and Matt Hall was screwing around with them.”

What everyone had heard from the governor’s office, however, was that the office doesn’t really look at the bills analytically until they end up on the governor’s desk.

“We never heard anything different through this 18-month fight through the courts,” Bieber said. “I never saw her speak out while we were doing the fight, one way or the other.

Once Bieber and his team issued statements of praise on Friday morning, he went kayaking on the river, without his phone and got lost in the splendor of nature. By the afternoon, he finally looked at his phone and received the news that the bills were dead on arrival.

“We thought for 18 months that we were fighting Matt Hall’s attempt to disregard the Constitution and play king,” Bieber said. “We didn’t know that we were fighting our governor, too. … They must be speed readers in the governor’s office, if they weren’t going to look at it until it hit her desk, because they sure made a decision in a hurry there.”

On Jan. 23, 2025, State Rep. Mai Xiong (D-Warren) offers an amendment to House Bill 4001, which aims to curtail changes to the state’s minimum wage and tipped minimum wage mandated by the state Supreme Court. | Kyle Davidson

Bieber’s criticism ends with Whitmer and House Republicans. He had nothing but praise for Senate Democrats and their House counterparts who helped them fight to get the bills even considered by Whitmer last week.

When he was finally explained by the governor’s office, Bieber said it mirrored her veto letter, which is what Snyder said of his own phone call with the governor’s office last week.

While Xiong was as disappointed as Bieber, Snyder and Hope, she remained adamant that the blame should not be placed at one person’s feet like Whitmer or Tate, with Xiong emphasizing that it was Hall who played political games with the legislation.

“I don’t want people to forget that he violated our constitution for 18 months, and it took three courts to essentially force him to release the bills,” Xiong said. “I know that there has been speculation about what happened those two weeks when we left for lame duck, and I want the people to know that one of those bills was mine, and it was a huge priority for many workers.”

To that, Xiong said she did her part to get the bill she sponsored to the floor and up for a vote. She also did what she could to hold Hall and the House clerk accountable when they had no great answers on why the bills were still being withheld into the 2025 session.

That said, with Whitmer’s refusal to sign the bills over technical issues, Xiong said she felt like “democracy died a little last week.” Her only course now is to move forward and try to get her bills reintroduced, passed and back to the governor’s desk — even if Whitmer isn’t sitting there.

“We failed the people of Michigan, and certainly there are concerns with the fiscal impact of my bill and the implementation of others. But overall, laws that have been passed in decades past are not perfect,” Xiong said. “We are constantly amending them, and that is the job that we have to do. … Our Michigan workers and other Michigan families put us in these places to help them, and we failed them. We greatly failed them collectively.”

The Michigan Advance, a hard-hitting, nonprofit news site, covers politics and policy across the state of Michigan through in-depth stories, blog posts, and social media updates, as well as top-notch progressive commentary. The Advance is part of States Newsroom, a national 501(c)(3) nonprofit supported by grants and a coalition of donors and readers.